Glossary Term – Event

The Socialist Party of America was formed by a merger of several democratic-socialist political groups. Rejecting industrial capitalism, the party aimed to increase the rights and power of farmers and laborers.

Glossary Term – Organization

Bolsheviks were the dominant political power in Russia after the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party seized control of that country’s government in 1917. The Bolsheviks (“Bolshevik” meaning “one of the majority”) were anti-feudal revolutionaries who were described in the United States as radical, anti-capitalist socialists. Under the leadership of Vladimir Leninm the Bolsheviks changed their party name to the “Russian Communist Party” in 1918 (and later to the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union”). In the United States, charges...

Glossary Term – Person

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a writer and muckraker whose 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the horrific and unsanitary practices of the American meatpacking industry. Sinclair, a Socialist reformer, hoped that the book would move the public towards socialism. Though it did not lead to a widespread socialist movement, The Jungle did prompt an investigation into the meatpacking industry and the Meat Inspection Act.

Primary Source

Teaching Resource

The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and arrogance . . . and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the socialistic propaganda.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1906

Reading 2

I think we are in a position, after the experience of the last 20 years, to state two things: in the first place, that a corporation may well be too...